Trapped in the Clouds, Pondering the Night : by Jon Paden and Robert Blatt.

A multimedia installation exploring turbulence and chaos through environmental and social indicators, inspired by a long fascination of simply staring at the sky and the place of imagination it elicits. The work encourages this imaginative, or even hallucinative state, through a multi-layered approach to augmented reality, multichannel video and audio, field recording, performance, kinetic sculpture and interactivity. The work itself is a pseudo-autonomous environment that still draws upon elements of traditional material aesthetics, such as paper, text, form and composition. The work utilizes 3-d meshes derived from point clouds built from photogrammetry techniques, processed in the cloud, which become volumetric clouds from an assortment of poetically charged objects created and found by the artists. Multiple layers of text are presented in the work, as speech recorded in various outdoor environments alongside an evolving overhead projection of text within the installation, constructed through a process of erasure from the World Meteorological Organization’s International Cloud Atlas. The exhibition is open for the public to drift in and out at will.